Is this year going to be the year that you manage to solve the age old problem of forgotten New Year’s resolutions?
I personally believe New Year’s resolutions are doomed before they are written, because they always consist of a list of those things which you believe you should be doing,

This game requires for both sides of the brain to work together. The logical-mind wants to deal with facts and exacts comparisons; it is uncomfortable with soft arguments since there is no way of proving one better than the other. In contrast, the creative-mind has no problems with equating soft arguments against one another.

It is impossible for the creative journal of a writer or artist to be just a traditional writer’s notebook – the ‘journal’ from which traditional journaling gains its name. In addition to recording written notes, a creative journal should also be able to capture visual scenes, sounds, graphics, movement, physical items, emotions, aromas, fragile thoughts (for example, whilst driving), tactile items and more.

The main purpose of this mind training game is to exercise getting in contact with your creative-mind and develop the ability to freely associate diverse ideas together.
The secondary purpose is to help you become more aware of the point when the mind switches from the logical-mind over to the creative-mind; to learn how to hear yourself.

Guy and Shawn have not tried to dumb down what is involved in a project as large as learning how to self-publish your own book. Nor have they attempted to make it sound easy, indeed they mention many times about daunting issues with editing, media formats, marketing, finance and the authors own commitment. Despite all these they have successfully trodden a difficult line and instead of scaring tentative self-publishers away from the idea, they have made a mammoth task and steep learning curve seem eminently do-able.

You can also do this with the other four senses and suddenly a wealth of associated sensations are available to you. Let your mind wander far and wide whilst it fills the page. It does not matter if you jump from childhood to adult memories or skip between continents as you skip across the page. Allow your brain to dance in and out of distant and diverse memories, allow it to open up and find its own half-forgotten connections as the exercise progresses.

Ideal creativity games would have you perform mental exercises tasking both the logical and the creative minds simultaneously, but this is seldom possible. The simple reality is that most available brain exercises fall slightly either side of this perfect balance. This makes a collection of mind games necessary to both develop the all important connection and the ability to transfer ideas between your creative-mind and your logical-mind.

One result of capturing your thoughts in a creative journal, and then reviewing those entries, is that thoughts continue to circulate in your subconscious. The outcome being that they drive more thoughts and more ideas up to the surface, which cause even more questions to be asked and even more possibilities to be considered.

Creative journaling feeds this “buzz”, and so during quiet periods of the day you will find your mind alive with new ideas and thoughts on your project.

This post follows on from So why journal?, in which I listed a few reasons why journaling is a sound investment of your time. Here, we further investigate the ‘Journaling to generate ideas’ section of that post, expanding the ideas and exploring their benefits in our quest of how to journal.
…Additionally, by being freed from the mindset of “having to complete a task in one sitting”, your creative thinking remains running, working away in the background, so more ideas surface whilst you go about your other tasks….

This post follows on from “So why journal?”, in which I listed a few reasons why journaling is a sound investment of your time. Here, we further investigate the ‘For organisation’ section of that post, expanding the ideas and exploring their benefits.